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CHAPTER VI THE Six DIRECTIONS OF ENERGY.
CHAPTER VI I THE TEMPERAMENTS COMBINED TWO BY TWO, FORMING SIX TYPES We may see, by this single example, the fecundity of our analogies. It is most natural to extend them. It is most natural to extend the Four Temperaments into the Six Types (three pairs or two trios, according to need) which our Theory has extracted from them, as we have seen above. But first let us define with precision these Six Types: The Objective, a combination of the Bilious and the Lymphatic, has as its dominating desire that of Being more, of Manifesting itself in works ; ELOQUENCE, ADVENTURE, PRIDE and LABOR are derived from this desire. (We shall see, in Chapter X, why these words are emphasized.) The features of this Type are broad, calm and harmonious, the demeanor grave and straightforward, the bodily posture upright even to the point of leaning backward. The body, of medium height, white of flesh and cold, lacks the thrill of life even when the blood is rich; the muscles, often overdeveloped, add to its heaviness. The hand writing is small, regular and a trifle cramped. The mind is broad and tolerant, through absence of passion; the ideas travel in immense circles without a clearly apparent object. The style is oratorical, explanatory, given to enlarging, by successive developments, points at first trivial. The natural tendency of opinion is conservative, plutocratic, even BOURGEOIS, hierarchic, friendly to law and order, to harmony, to respectability, with happiness or serenity as the aim. A defect of this type is slowness of mental processes. In philosophy, these are the pantheists; in science, the physicians; in art, the sculptors. The women of this type love like men; the children prefer their mother to their father. The Subjective, or better yet, the Possessive, since the dominant instinct is to Have, to Possess, is a combination of the Nervous and the Sanguine. Whether grasping or prodigal, these are monopolists, and thereby sentimentalists also; jealous and frequently despotic, they live in a state of passion and are often unjust in consequence. Thought, with them, springs from within outward. Their unquiet hearts are the source of their faults or their vices. They are chthonians, Titans, always in eruptions or in tempests. In science, they will be chemists; in art, painters or musicians; in politics, judges or dictators. Theirs are expressive faces, yet with inequalities caused by this or that ugly feature; skin like alabaster, flashing eyes whose gaze easily hypnotizes. Their gestures are enthusiastic, imperious, excited; steps short and unequal; handwriting full of variations and flourishes. The speech is animated, the style spirited, full of antitheses and rhetorical figures. The children of this type prefer their father to their mother. Later, especially if the Sanguine be predominant, this tendency renders disturbing their admiration for virile beauty. The Active, a mingling of the Sanguine and Bilious, closely approaches the preceding, but its formula is Action. People of this type do not limit themselves to passionate censure or condemnation, like the Subjectives; they revolt, they strike; neither do they travel in circles like the Objectives; their energy has a more active effect. Their thought is, above all, practical and shrewd. Bold, clever, sometimes unscrupulous, often patronizing and protecting, dangerous as adversaries, they have the art of leading the crowd, which is always militarist as soon as its fears are overcome, and which finds in this type something of its own grossness, its own brutality. Well developed virile figures, bearded faces, tanned complexions; gestures forceful and concentrated, restless bodily attitudes as though always on the point of action, coarse language and vigorous methods in all things are characteristic of them. They lie with facility, risk life readily, have a tendency to take the shortest cut to the object in view; they are experimenters, ever ready to try something new, with the audacity of scepticism and with a total irreverence for the past, which they neither understand nor appreciate. Their handwriting is rapid; they have a lively narrative style and furnish many popular story-writers. They have an egotism which is readily condoned, and an ability to extricate themselves from almost any difficulty. They love the natural sciences. The Passive, or rather Sensitive, since their great role is to Feel, unite in themselves the Nervous and the Lymphatic. They pass from art to faith, from fidelity to sensuality, since, sensitive and emotional, they vibrate to every contact. Their flesh is fine and delicate, even morbidly so; the outlines of the figure are rounded. Gestures as well as words are often involuntary; the postures indolent, the manner well-poised. The handwriting remains always immature. The style is harmonious, flowery, descriptive. This nature is essentially musical, and frequently becomes religious. Impressions from without overcome impulses from within. In politics, they are devotedly legitimist, faithful to the throne as to the altar, influenced by ancient traditions of loyalty and royalty, of "divine right," of aristocracy, of "the good old times." They have a profound seriousness in matters of sentiment, which expresses itself in delicate old-fashioned language. Will-power is deficient, artifice and hypocrisy frequent. Sometimes there is coquetry, sometimes worse; but the family virtues are usual in this type. The Intellectual (Bilious-Nervous) are abstract thinkers; their role is to Idealize. The possessive instinct in them translates itself into avarice or ambition; emotionalism into prudence, virtue, theology; activity into subtility. Theoretical, mathematical, systematic, their mentality has both a literal and an imaginative tendency. Their language is full of strange expressions, acquired and used almost unconsciously. Their style, concise, elliptic, intense, vivid, reveals their originality, which we discover also in their BIZARRE handwriting, jerky and angular, in their odd personal mannerisms, in their long and somewhat heavy steps, with an excessive bending at the knees. Their opinions are essentially individualistic, anarchistic, destructive, pessimistic; a strong sense of the rights of personality causes them to hold all things admissible which lead toward the ideal state in which individuals and ideas shall not be dominated by mass stupidity. They are usually thin of flesh, with rounded shoulders and chest; the nose is nerve RETROUSSE, for all the bodily lines curve from above downward. Lastly, the Physical, whose constant aim is to Realize, to Materialize, and in whom the Sanguine and the Lymphatic mingle, show, on the contrary, heavy flesh, sometimes plump and dimpled, sometimes bloated and ugly. The facial and bodily lines tend to turn upward. They are always thickset; their movements, nevertheless, are easy, and neither in step nor posture are they hampered or clumsy. Prosaic dullness is the defect of their minds, whose grossness is sometimes expressed in violent or voluptuous tastes. The letters of the handwriting are short, rounded, heavy. Their opinions, social in tendency, rest upon some doctrine of solidarity, of cooperation, of mass effort, and have little regard for initiative and for that inequality which is so fecund. They are socialistic levellers. A mind of this type often ends in materialism; its science will be that of industry, its life one of adaptation, its art merely a photographic realism. II HISTORIC TENDENCY TO GENERAL GROUPINGS OF Six Now these six moral and physical types, so distinct, are nothing else than the extension of our energy in one of the six directions into which the three dimensions of space divide themselves: height (upward, downward), breadth (to right, to left), depth (before and behind). Already the organs of our bodies are adapted to these six directions: our legs carry us forward and backward, our arms extend to right and left, while, in an eternal antithesis, our heads look upward and the weight of our bodies draws us downward. Now the SOUL cannot escape these conditions, whether we regard spiritual energy as simply a subtilization of physical energy, or whether we see in the latter but a symbol of the soul. If the soul dwell upon vulgar things, it ABASES itself, as we say; it UPLIFTS itself toward God in its expansion and detachment from earthly things ; it inclines toward the RIGHT, so to speak, in actions clearly governed by the will, and to the LEFT in those governed by emotional impulse; to "possess," is not this to be held BACK, and to "manifest" to go FORWARD? To manifest and to possess, to act and to feel, to idealize and to materialize, is not this the whole of life? We see the Orator, "rising," deliver his EXORDIUM. "Before" him, "before" us, he places his PROPOSITION. His NARRATION, following, carries us "back" with him into the tyrannical past. He brandishes, as a sword in his "right" hand, his CONFIRMATION, and, to the "left," wards off sinister attacks with the buckler of his REFUTATION. Then his discourse "descends" and ends with the PERORATION. Such, according to Rhetoric, are the six parts of an oration; the six directions of its force. Poetry also, if we believe Aristotle, contains six corresponding parts. And the Politics of Plato enumerates six types of government : the objective and majestic MONARCHY, the abstract and lofty ARISTOCRACY, the military and active TlMOCRACY, the materialistic OLIGARCHY of the plutocrats, the sentimental DEMOCRACY of the masses, and the jealous TYRANNY. They succeed one another inevitably in the same order, and the philosopher seeks not merely an image, but THE CAUSE, in the six types of human character, which is to say, for us, in their six "attitudes" respecting the passions There were too (was it for this reason?) six Classes in Rome, as there were six cases in its declensions, one reflects with a smile. And Physics, which in nature envisages only force, only energy, is it not also divided into six parts? Does not Crystallography reduce all its polyhedrons to six groups of forms? And, if we would amuse ourselves longer with these butterfly-flights which are called Analogies (and which likewise begin in childish poetic caprice, to end perhaps as a science), we may still cite the six "days" or periods of Creation, which, fifty-two times a year, the Christian, Jewish and Moslem week repeats and celebrates in its six days.* The seventh period was consecrated to rest. But Sunday, according to Genesis, saw the birth of light and darkness; Monday, the fluids, air and water; Tuesday, the principal minerals and vegetables; Wednesday, the astronomical organization of our sun and stars; Thursday, the fish and birds of our earth; Friday, the terrestrial animals and humanity. The six gods early established over these six days correspond to the six types which we have just drawn from the four temperaments combined two by two. The Sun-god is our Sensitive, the Moon our jealous Possessive; Mars is our Active, virile and brutal; the ingenious Mercury is our Intellectual, the majestic Jupiter our Objective and the sensual Venus our Physical. These six types have had an incomparable fortune; not only have they served all the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but we find them, clearly specified, in Shakespeare, who makes constant allusion to them* and evidently constructs from them a method for his classification of men. We find them again in Schiller, who seems for a time to have preferred them to the four primitive temperaments dear to his master Kant.** Ill ANALOGOUS GROUPINGS OF SEVEN AND THREE As for the seventh type, that of Saturn, it has been little used except by dullards who have corrupted the system. It rests, in effect, on the superstitious idea of Evil Fortune. Its characters are alternately those of the six others, obscured by this conception, which, as we shall see further on, is one of the subdivisions of Apollo, stripped of personal passion. If vicious, it corresponds to the type of Venus, and if cold, to Diana; dry and abstract, to the intellectual Mercury; hard and destructive, to Mars. It seems to have been invented merely for the sake of reaching the cabalistic number of 7. All the personages, human or divine, of this seventh class, may be reduced to the number of half a dozen, by the fact that they all contain a composite and central type. This keeps, from the depths at which we see it, the too bright or too sombre color of its origin. Of the seven princes of the Devs, six are thus subordinated to the sinister Ahriman, whose emanations they represent, and the seven Amschasfands, for their part, signify simply the six Gahanbars (each placed over a season or double-month of the year), plus the Universal Ormuz. For, although we prefer to divide the year into four seasons, in which we have seen above suggestive analogies with the temperaments, races, ages, centuries, parts of the day and of the world which it lights, we should not forget that it is not NECESSARILY thus divided. And it has not always been thus divided, as we have just observed in the case of the Persian year, and as we may observe in the case of the liturgic year, also divided into six parts, but unequal ones: Advent, Christmas season, Septuagesima, Lent, Paschal season and the season after Pentecost. The Greeks, too, showed perhaps a finer sense of life than ours when thsy recognized but three seasons : Ear, Op6ra and Chim6n, or the Green, the Fruitful and the Sad. They identified these with the Beotian Thallo, Carpo and Auxo, symbolizing Flower, Fruit and Growth; with the Cretan Irene, Eunomia and Dirce (Harmony, Power, Justice), more abstract, but having the same profound significance; they compared them to the three Graces, the gentle Aglaia, the joyous Euphrosyne and Thalia of the feasts; to the three Gorgons, to the three Sirens and to the three Eumenides, whose roles in destiny we know. It is this habit of mind which explains how Aristotle, by analogy, draws in his ''Poetics" but three ages of man: Youth, Maturity and Age, although, accustomed to our four seasons, we moderns tend always to insert a fourth. Observe that the three seasons of the Greeks readily divide themselves into the six of the Persians: Season of Buds and Season of Foliage; Season of Harvest and Season of Vintage; Season of Darkness and Season of Snow. Although some of these divisions may appear variable, because they blend into one another like the colors of the spectrum, we cannot therefore pronounce them artificial and unreal. Such an ingratitude to Analogies, so constantly fecund in the human mind, would be both precipitate and imprudent.